Have you ever wondered what it's like to win over $500,000 in a single session of online poker? It's something most people can only dream of and only a select few will ever accomplish. Yesterday, stevesbets joined that elite fraternity. Steve "stevesbets" Jacobs is a professional high stakes online poker player who specializes in heads up no limit hold em events. Steve has been playing in big buy-in events for years. In January 2004, about four and a half years ago, Steve won a tournament on PartyPoker for $65,000, which represented his first big tournament score. He's gone on to go deep in a number of WPT and WSOP events, not to mention played millions of hands of online poker at the highest levels. On Sunday Sept 14th, Steve won the $25,000 buy-in PokerStars WCOOP 19 heads up event for $560,000 and he spoke with me on Monday about his win:

What goes through your mind when you win over $500k in a single day?

For me, it didn't sink in yet. Your mind is just kind of blank. You don't really feel the effect because it's so sudden and exciting. I was thinking more about transfer to people who had a piece of me and the administrative stuff more than the win. Of course, I'm also thinking about things like security of the money online, but I obviously trust PokerStars and I feel safe with my money there.

Among your friends, you've referred to this tournament as your personal super bowl. Why's that?

I jokingly called it that because for me it's the most important tournament of the year. It's deep stacked heads up no limit, which is my specialty. It might sound like arrogance, but I would say I'm the best player in the world in that format and I would have said that before Sunday's win. I always get deep in these big multi-table heads up events and it was nice to finally win one. They don't happen too often, so you need to take advantage of them when they do.

You were down in basically every match, sometimes by large margins. What is going through your mind when you know you have an uphill battle like that?

It's frustrating to be down a lot in chips, but at the same time the structure of the tournament was very good and I had plenty of time to climb back. When I was low in chips, I tended to tighten up and treat my chips carefully until I found the right spots to get back into matches. It's very important to be patient in those sorts of situations.

I hadn't played most of my opponents a lot except for Isaac Haxton and ElkY, so it took me some time to learn their tendencies. But once I figured a lot of them out, it became much easier to outplay them. From my point of view, they all had very exploitable tendencies with the exception of Genius28.

So would you say Genius28 was the toughest player you faced? What about the weakest?

Yes. I was fortunate to run well against Genius28 because he was the toughest player in the field and probably the player I least-wanted to face. ElkY was definitely the weakest player I faced.

I'm not saying ElkY is the best player in the world, but he's pretty accomplished in poker, so to hear he's the weakest is a little surprising. What would you say made ElkY the weakest?

It isn't that ElkY doesn't understand how to play poker, it's more that he was the weakest player from my perspective. We've played thousands of matches -- maybe even tens of thousands of matches -- against each other on PokerStars in the Heads-Up Sit and Goes. I'm sure every heads up player knows what I'm talking about when I say that, for some players, you feel like you have a really good read on them and that it's almost hard to lose. For me, ElkY is one of those players. Like Grimstarr and a few other high stakes players, ElkY is a player who I feel has very little chance to beat me (on a relative basis, considering that aggressive heads up play has a lot of variance). In a deep-stacked event where I can recover from a few hits to my chip stack, ElkY has even less of a chance to beat me.

Can you point to anything specific about his game?

He makes really loose calls. As an example, I made a misclick overbet with top pair top kicker when I had AQ on a Q high board. ElkY instantly called with something like bottom two pair -- or at least a low two pair. That's bad call. His hand was only going to be good a very low percentage of the time. He couldn't possibly have known my bet was a misclick since I do employ overbetting as part of my strategy against certain types of players. A lot of players would lay that hand down, but, he's ElkY, so he instantly calls it.

Don't you think you could be accused of making loose calls too? In fact, I can imagine a number of high-stakes regulars laughing when they see you accusing someone of making loose calls.

You have to look at factors like match flow, chip stacks, etc. I do make loose calls, but not in the same situations as ElkY. He didn't even consider that I hadn't shown huge bluffs in later streets, yet he was still calling huge bets on later streets with marginal holdings. It's hard to explain when a loose call is correct because it has so much to do with flow and situation. There are times when loose calls are appropriate and I certainly do make them as any successful heads up player has to, but ElkY seems to make them in all the wrong spots against me. It is part of what makes him one of the easiest high stakes regulars for me to beat.

I should also mention that I was actually being totally serious when I wanted to chop 50/50 when I was down 3-1 in chips. He turned it down, but that was the only point I would have actually chopped with him.

A lot of people online were talking about the speed of your play, particularly in the match against ElkY when both of you were playing fast. What do you have to say to those people who say you play too fast to make good decisions?

Heads up no limit poker is more about getting into a good flow than analyzing hand ranges and statistics every single hand. Obviously odds and hand ranges play a factor, but heads up is such a mental game they aren't the primary factor for me. I am thinking more about how the match flow is proceeding than I am about what % of the time a player has X hand when they re-raise preflop because their re-raise preflop has more to do with the flow than it does with their actual holdings. Hopefully that makes some sense.

Historically against Elky, we're two of the fastest players and I really like to play him because it’s really easy to get into a good flow. Other than flow considerations, I don't like playing against slow players because it tends to speed up the structure of a heads up match (i.e., less hands per level) and I like to play deep for as often as possible. To say I wasn't thinking completely isn't true, I just make split second decisions because I've played so many hands and I have a pretty good feel for what the right move is at any given point in the match.

However, I play quickly even when it isn't an online heads up event. For example, when I play live big-buy-in full-ring tournament poker, I don't think I've ever had a decision that took more than 10 seconds. And most decisions take me about two seconds. John Phan and Scotty Nguyen like to hollywood-it-up every hand. You just don't need that long to make decisions in a poker game. For me when I'm playing heads up online, that's especially true and flow is far more important.

* Article image: stevesbets playing in the final match of WCOOP 19 against ElkY


This is Part 1 of 2 of Nat "N 82 50 24" Arem's interview with Steve "stevesbets" Jacobs. Part 2